Sinister Simulacra
by Alixtii
Summary: Wesley, Fred, and Dawn resolve a dangling plotline left over from Lineage: who were those robots, anyway?
1. Chapter 1

"That was a signal, okay? Is that clear enough for you?"

Wesley smiled. "Not even close."

They kissed, and it was everything that he imagined, everything that he had dreamed—

"If you're in the middle of something, I can always come back later," a voice broke in. Female. Young.

Wesley disengaged from Fred, spun around. To stare at a young brunette he instantly recognized. "Dawn," he said, and he could hear the surprise in his voice.

"Buffy's sister?" Fred asked, confused.

"And recently promoted High Council member," Wesley added. He looked at Dawn, who looked basically the same as she had a couple of weeks ago, although her clothing was slightly less casual and he could almost swear that she held herself with just a bit more confidence. "I hear you conducted yourself admirably in Brazil."

Dawn looked him in the eye. "Eighteen Slayers died in Brazil," she said, but she said it matter-of-factly, as he might have said it. Sentimentality would be a luxury in which she would not be able to indulge.

"So," interjected Fred, "why are you here?" She didn't say it unkindly, but the confusion was clear in her voice.

"Angel said the two of you would be down here," Dawn said, walking closer to them and picking up a nearby remote control. She turned off the episode of "Smile Time" which was still playing on the television. "I need to talk to you."

"What about?" asked Fred.

"Just the fact that a robot impersonated a High Council member and almost succeeded at committing atrocities in our name," Dawn said.

"But that happed well before Christmas," Fred said.

"The Council's been dragging its feet on account of you being evil," Dawn explained. "Buffy doesn't trust you, Giles doesn't trust you, Lydia doesn't trust you and God knows your father doesn't trust you, Wesley. They finally sent me because I'm the only one who doesn't wildly distrust you guys."

She didn't say that she did trust them, Wesley noticed. Good for her.

"Well, do you want to see the robots?" asked Fred. "We have them in storage?" Then, as an afterthought, she paused and looked at Wesley. "Would you rather—?"

"I can look at the cybernetic remains of something which is _not_ my father," he said, stepping forward towards the storage facilities. Fred typed a few codes into the console at her left. "It'll be a few moments until the system brings them up from the basement," she said, but almost as soon as she finished speaking the wall opened up to reveal two specimens: one the remains of his father's robot clone, the other one of the ninja assassins.

"As you can see, portions of the . . . thing are biological, whereas others are cybernetic. There's really no way of knowing whether this started out as somebody, or whether the whole thing was built up out of scratch. We finally cracked the encryption on its central processor using a random transform variable-selection, but we didn't learn much. It's memory was pretty clean."

"Any clue who could have made it?" Dawn asked, peering into the robot's innards.

Fred shrugged. "Someone who was good at what he or she did, that's for sure. And working alone. Nobody on my staff has ever seen anything like any of these components; they didn't go through any of the usual distributors."

"So there's no way of tracing these things back to their creator?"

"As my f—as the robot pointed out when _it_ was here, the power core is marked by Dutrovic markings. I've searched through the Saitama Codex —"

"But the journals of a 12th-century monk don't exactly contain references to bionic clones."

Wesley nodded. "Exactly."

"Perhaps that's because they're not at Dutrovic at all."

Wesley re-examined them. "What do you mean? I've checked them myself. They represent—"

Dawn cut him off again. "The instructions for dismantling the power core. Yes. But only if you read all the ideograms. Dutrovic typically skips every third syllable if the writing isn't mystical in nature. It's Moracian—you need to read it from the bottom up, interpreting the Dutrovic stops as guttural clicks."

Wesley paused, looking at the symbols again. She was right. "I told him that it was Moracian," he said to Fred.

"It's not quite grammatical," Dawn said. "It's difficult to get something to read sensibly in two languages at once, after all. But it's a binding spell, possibly for protection."

"So what does that mean?" Fred asked.

"That the creator of the robots knows both Dutrovic and Moracian—as the two clans have been at war for millennia," Wesley answered. "It has to be a third party. What type of binding spell is it?"

"Thaumaturgic," Dawn answered after examining it a bit more. "Which gives us just enough information to triangulate."

Wesley nodded. "Tryrens," he said. Oh, well. The news could have been worse.


	2. Chapter 2

Ever since the Iverna Massacre of 1876 which had wiped out the entire native Muscovite populations, the Tryren demons had been know to inhabit only one location—the Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest in Nebraska. There was, after all, no accounting for demonic taste.

And so he found himself sitting in front of a campfire, holding a stick with a marshmallow on the end and watching Dawn and Fred sing campfire songs.

The marshmallow caught fire, and Fred laughed and grabbed the stick, pulling it out of the flames of the campfire. "You can't just leave it in there forever," she said, blowing out the flames, although Wesley saw little reason why he couldn't do exactly that.

But Fred insisted on him making a s'more out of the marshmallow, and then eating it, and he reluctantly agreed.

"What's next?" he managed to ask once he had swallowed most of the marshmallow. "Are you going to tell ghost stories?"

Dawn shook her head. "I think we get enough of that in our everyday lives." She yawned. "I think I'm going to turn in. We still have quite a bit of hiking to do tomorrow." She got up and left the campfire ring, entering one of the two tents they had pitched earlier.

Wesley and Fred were left in front of the campfire, watching it as it burned away,

"What are you thinking about?" Fred asked after a while, placing a hand on his shoulder.

"Dawn," he said, looking at the tent she had just entered. "So much rests on her shoulders for someone so young. I don't envy her position."

"She seems to manage," Fred observed.

"She has to," Wesley answered. "She knows what will happen if she fails."

"Come on," said Fred, pulling his arm. "Let's go to bed."

* * *

  
They were up at the break of dawn the next morning, broke camp, and began to continue their hiking deep into the forest, into the heart of Tryren territory.

Dawn stopped, disturbed. "It's too quiet," she said. "Where are the Tryren songs?" Tryrens, Wesley knew, emitted a high-pitched sound with sounded suspiciously like a fat woman yodeling. It was a distinctive sound and Dawn was right: it didn't make any sense that they hadn't heard it already.

"You won't hear it," a voice answered. Wesley turned to see—where he would have sworn there had been no one—a young woman dressed in short and simple diaphanous brown dress. She was barefoot, and she leant against a tree. "They were massacred, every one of them, after being forced to give up their secrets."

"Who are you?" asked Fred, giving words to the question they had all been thinking.

"I am a spirit of the trees," she said simply.

"A dryad," Wesley whispered.

"The forest calls out with their pain and suffering," she said. "They were a part of us, and now they are gone."

"Do you know who did it?" asked Dawn.

The dryad nodded. "He has constructed a fortress of stone north of here. Keep on walking and you will not be able to miss it. The goodwill of the trees goes with you."

* * *

  
The stone castle, built in the middle of a national forest in Nebraska, was, as the dryad promised, difficult to miss. Oddly enough for a fortification made of stone, the front gate was open.

"Well, there's nowhere to go but inside," Dawn said, taking off her backpack and resting it against the castle wall. She pulled out a sword and then, tentatively, stepped inside the fortress. Wesley and Fred followed.

After passing through several levels of (open) fortifications, they entered what seemed to be a massive courtyard, full of robots fashioned into all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some were fashioned to look like celebrities, others various politicians.

And one was shaped in a very familiar shape indeed.

"Hey Dawn," it said. "You're my sister. I love you very much despite frequently finding you annoying and have not seen you in a very long time."

"It's . . . a Buffybot," Dawn said.

"A what?"

"Someone built of robot of Buffy a few years ago," Dawn explained, staring at the simulacrum of her sister. "It looked exactly like this, sounded like it. Only, it was destroyed and the person who built it is dead."

"There's death," a male voice cut in, "and then there's death."

* * *

  
"The body of Warren Mears is dead," the man said, grinning mischeviously at the trio, "murdered by that bitch of a witch. But I had contingency plans. The important part of me—my mind—lives on."

It was Dawn who actually said it. "You're a robot!"

"No shit, Sherlock," Mears said. "Took you long enough to catch on."

"Good," said Dawn, raising a sword. "Then we won't feel so bad when we kill you again."

Mears only laughed. "Kill me again?" he asked. "Take a look around. What potential battle are you talking about?"

Wesley looked around. They were surrounded by robots, he realized, and didn't stand a ghost of a chance. 


	3. Chapter 3

Wesley hated villains who cackled. Even worse, he found, were villains who defended their decisions to cackle with claims of "camp."

"What are you planning to do with us?" Dawn asked. They were all strapped down to what looked like operating tables from a B horror movie.

"My robot of your father," Mears said, pointing at Wesley, "was a good start. But it wasn't good enough. You would have caught on, eventually. Something would have given him away. I just didn't have enough data. But here, I have the original specimens. I can create exact copies, complete with your memories, your secret desires, your subtle quirks. The only difference between you and them will be that they will be utterly loyal to me, obeying my every command. Just think: I will have two senior staffers at the L.A. branch of Wolfram & Hart and a High Watcher under my influence. The foundation will be put in place for eventual world domination."

"And how are the three of us supposed to take over the world?" asked Fred, incredulous.

"What do you think?" asked Mears. "I'm some sort of Bond villain? That I'll just spill my evil plan so you can escape and spoil it?"

"No," answered Fred. "Actually, I was just curious."

"Oh." Mears seemed to consider. "In that case, I will expand my sphere of influence slowly and subtly. With the help of your robot clones, I will replace a few more highly-placed individuals each year, until all the world's leaders ultimately take orders from me."

It struck Wesley as a pretty horrible plan as far as evil plans for world domination went, but he had far more immediate worries.

"Unfortunately, the process of transferring your minds to your robotic doubles may cause you some degree of discomfort," said Mears. "I prefer to kill you without anesthesia. Igor! Inga!"

Robotic duplicates of Marty Feldman and Teri Gar entered, and Wesley had to admit the likeness was pretty good. Meanwhile, Mears had donned a lab coat and safety goggles. "Scalpel," he said, and the Inga robot promptly handed him a wicked-looking weapon.

Wesley knew he had to do something, or else this crazy robot would be cutting into his skull. Anything. His mind raced, coming to come up with some weakness in his opponent.

Wait. Hadn't Dawn said that the robots they had dissected contained a Moravian binding spell? Then maybe—

"_Esrever eht lleps!_" Wesley attempted. The two robots promptly stopped for a moment, then Igor reached out and grabbed Mears' hand. "What did you do to them?" Mears asked, suddenly clearly very angry.

"Cast the counterspell to the binding spell which kept your robots from rebelling," Dawn spoke up from her bed on the other side of Fred. "Could someone let me out of here?"

Inga moved to begin unfastening Dawn, but Mears and Igor were practically having an arm wrestling match over Wesley's head. "You can do this to me!" Mears shouted. "I created them! They belong to me!"

"Not any more, _master_," Igor said pointedly as he ripped off Mears' cybernetic arm with a sudden display of power. The next moment he was severing off the head.

* * *

  
"Thank you for setting us free," Igor said, backed by Mears' army of assorted robots. "We appreciate it." 

"All in a days work," Wesley said, truthfully. "If Mears managed to build a castle here without anyone noticing, chances are you should be able to continue to exist here without anyone bothering."

Igor nodded. "We will take care of our home. We regret the murders of the Tryren, but were unable to resist our orders."

The three humans picked up their backpacks and began to hike out of the forest.

"Well, that ended better than most things tend to do," Dawn said, leading the way. "Definitely a win for the good guys."

"Let's get back to work," Fred said, turning to Wesley and giving him a long, slow kiss. "Wolfram & Hart's probably gone to hell without us."


End file.
